The Edge of Tomorrow

by Howard Fast

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that his cat walked into the—what would it be—between two electrodes or something like electrodes?”

  “A vortex?”

  “Perhaps. Whatever it is, his cat walked into it and disappeared. Poof—just like that. No cat. So he tried it on himself—he has the emotional stability of a six year old, if you ask me—and nothing at all happened. So he wants you to get in your car and get right over to his basement and let him know what you make of it.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know,” Alice frowned. “He assured me that it had nothing to do with atomic disintegration or anything of that sort or there would have been a dreadful explosion and he wouldn’t have been talking to me at all. I think he thought that was a joke—he laughed. The kind of humor a professor uses with his students. Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t mind me at all. You can’t hurt my feelings now.”

  “And I told him to go to hell. Not in those words—I told him you were spending the night with your brother in Hartford, and when he wanted your brother’s telephone number, I said it had been temporarily disconnected, so he got the address and sent you a wire there, or he said he would. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Now it’s my turn,” I repeated, and I went over to the window and looked down.

  “Looking for yourself?” Alice wanted to know.

  “That’s a damn poor joke.”

  “Sorry. Really, I am, Bob.” She got up and came over to me and put her arm through mine. “I know you have trouble. Why don’t you try to tell me?”

  “Will you believe me?”

  “I think I can believe anything, now.”

  “Good. Now sit down again. I want you to sit down and look at me.” She did this dutifully, and rested her elbow on the arm of the chair, her chin on her knuckles, and looked at me. “I am your husband, Robert Clyde Bottman. Right?”

  “I accept that.”

  “And all those others you saw today—they were also me, your husband, Robert Clyde Bottman—right?”

  She nodded.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Oh, no—not me. As soon as I try to make anything out of it, I’ll go screaming mad. What do you make of it?”

  “I’ll tell you,” I said. “This morning, at ten-thirty, you left the house to go shopping downtown. I was correcting papers. Shortly after you left, the bell rang. I opened the door—and there I was. The first one.”

  “Gray herringbone, you mean.”

  “Exactly. And I wasn’t too surprised at first. He looked familiar, but nobody really knows what they look like to someone else. The worst moment came, when I discovered that it was myself—not an imitation, not a copy, not a fraud, not proof that the devil actually exists, but myself. It was me. I was me. It was me. We both were Robert Clyde Bottman. We both were the real thing. Do you understand?”

  For the first time, there was fear and horror in my wife’s face as she shook her head and said, “No—I don’t, Bob.”

  “Listen,” I went on. “He explained it to me. Or I explained it to me, take your choice. And while he was explaining, the doorbell rang, and I opened it, and there I was again. Three of us now. Then we began to fight it out philosophically, and the doorbell rang again. Four of us—”

  “Bob, tell me!”

  “Yes—now listen. Take today in terms of time. What happens to it when tomorrow comes?”

  “Oh, it’s yesterday, and stop that, Bob. Tell me what happened. I can’t stand much more of this.”

  “And I’m trying to tell you, believe me, Alice. But first we have to talk about time. What is time?”

  “Bob, I don’t know what time is. Time is time. It passes.”

  “And I don’t know any more than that, when you come right down to it. And neither does anyone else. But it’s been a philosophical football for ages. I walk across this room. Time passes. I have been in a number of places just in this room, all connected by my actual physical being. What happened to me as I was two minutes ago? I was. I cease to exist. I reappear.”

  “Nonsense,” Alice snorted. “You’re here all the time.”

  “Because I am connected with myself in terms of time. Suppose Time is an aspect of motion. No motion, no time. If you will, think of a path in terms of motion. You move along it—everything we are conscious of moves in parallel terms. But nothing disappears—it is all there always, yesterday, tomorrow, a million years from now—a reality that we are conscious of only in the flickering transition of now—this moment, this instant.”

  “I don’t understand that at all, and I don’t believe it either,” Alice said. “Is this some new kismet—fate, a future ordained for us?”

  “No, no,” I said impatiently. “It’s not that. The path isn’t fixed. It’s fluid, it changes all the time. But we can’t sit and argue about it, because we’re moving along it. And I have to tell you before we go too far. Those other myselfs—”

  “Just call them gray herringbone,” Alice said weakly.

  “Very well, gray herringbone. They told me what happened today.”

  “Before it happened?”

  “Before it happened and after it happened. That makes no difference. It’s a paradox. That’s why this sort of thing can’t be handled by the mental equipment we have. There’s no room for paradox. The most illogical man is still logical in terms of paradox. Today happened to me. I corrected the papers. You came home. Professor Dunbar telephoned and told me about the cat. I rushed over to his place. I took a panel of transistors with me, found where his circuit burned out, rewired it. You see, I had wired it originally. I was trembling with excitement then—”

  “You were trembling with excitement?” Alice said.

  “Yes. Well, I react to different things. You can’t imagine how exciting this was—actually to warp space, even if a tiny bit of it. I wasn’t thinking about time then. You see, I had picked up the professor’s cat outside his door, and I brought it in with me. There were three cats there, but I didn’t think twice about that. I picked up the one on the doorstep and brought it in. The professor was delighted. We decided that a space-warp had placed the cat outside the house. So when I hooked in the transistors and threw the power, I stepped between the electrodes myself. What could be more natural?”

  “Nothing,” Alice said. “Oh—nothing at all. Very natural, only they give the younger generations to you to be taught.”

  “And that was five PM, today.”

  “And now it’s four-thirty PM,” Alice shrugged. “Today was, but it isn’t yet. For God’s sake, Bob, I am a woman. Talk sense to me!”

  “I am trying to. You must accept it—don’t think about it, accept it. The warp was in time, maybe in space too, maybe the two are inseparable. We only had three hundred amps—a very slight effect, a tiny loop or twist in time, and then it snapped back. But the damage was done. My own particular time belt now had a five hour loop in it. In other words, it was repeating itself, endlessly, eternally, and each time it repeated, I was stranded here—no, I don’t make sense, do I?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Alice agreed sadly. “You said it happened.”

  “It did. But I was pushed back to before it happened. I went straight to the apartment. I rang the bell. I opened the door and let myself in. I told myself—”

  “Stop that!” Alice cried. “Stop talking about yourself. Say gray herringbone, if you must.”

  “All right. Gray herringbone, and he told me what had happened. Heaven knows how many times the loop had repeated already—”

  “Wouldn’t you know if it repeated?”

  “How could I know? My own consciousness is only for now—not for yesterday, not for tomorrow. How could I know?”

  Alice shook her head dumbly.

  “Anyway,” I continued desperately, “today, my today, our today, this morning, I decided to stop it. I had to stop it. I would go insane, the whole world would go insane if I didn’t stop it. But they—the gray h
erringbones—they didn’t want me to stop it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they were afraid. They were afraid that they would die. They want to live as much as I do. I am the first me, and therefore the real me; but they are also me—different moments of consciousness in me—but they are me. But they couldn’t stop me. They couldn’t interfere with me. When I told them to get out, they had to go. If they interfered, it might mean death for them too. So they left. But some of them watched downstairs—and some in other places, and all of them myself. Do you wonder that I am half insane?”

  “All right, my dear,” Alice said gently. “What did you do then?”

  “I put on the blue suit, not the gray one. I climbed down the fire-escape, through the house opposite ours, hailed a cab, and checked in here at the hotel.”

  “But if what you say is true,” Alice said, beginning to share my own fear and horror, “any one of you—of the gray herringbone—can go to Dunbar instead—”

  I nodded. “I thought of that. I’m not certain it would work that way. But to make sure, I took the transistor panel with me. It would take at least ten hours of work and a good electronics shop to duplicate it. They can repair the circuit—and maybe it will be enough power for a cat, but not for a man. I can swear that. Not for a man—”

  “But if they do?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Nothing will ever again be the way it was. How many of me will the world contain? I don’t know—”

  “And if you stop it, Bob?” Whether she understood me or not, she believed me. Her eyes said that; the fear was deep and wet and sick in her eyes.

  “I can’t answer that,” I shrugged. “I don’t know. We just scraped at a great mystery. I don’t know. All we can do is sit and wait. Less than a half hour to five o’clock, so it’s not too long to wait.”

  Then we waited. At first we tried to talk, but we couldn’t talk much. Then we were silent. Then, a few minutes before five o’clock, Alice came over to me and kissed me. I pushed her back and into her chair. “I’ve got to be alone for this.” I waited for anything, more afraid than I ever have been, before that or since, and then it was five o’clock. We compared watches. We called the desk and checked the time. It was five minutes past the hour. Then Alice began to cry, and I let her cry it out. Then we decided to go home.

  There was a crowd and commotion down in the lobby, but we didn’t stop. Later I realized that one of them would have remembered that I liked the Waldorf and would go there, but then we didn’t stop.

  We got a cab. As we drove uptown, we saw seven separate crowds, accident crowds, which are unmistakable in New York. “This town is becoming a battlefront,” the driver said. We didn’t say anything at all. But there were no gray herringbones, not along the way, not in front of the house we lived in and not waiting for us in our apartment.

  We were home less than an hour when the police came. Two plainclothes men and two men in uniform. They talked like cops and wanted to know whether I was Professor Robert Clyde Bottman.

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I teach physics at Columbia University.”

  “You got anything to identify yourself?”

  “Well, I live here,” I said. “Of course I have.”

  “You got pictures of yourself?”

  I wanted to know if they had gone out of their minds, but Alice smiled sweetly and brought our scrapbook and our family album. That seemed to satisfy them a little; wholly satisfied, they never were. For in three places in New York, friends of mine had been talking to me when I disappeared. Just disappeared—poof, and done with.

  One of the plainclothes men asked if I was twins, and the other said, “He’d have to be better than triplets.”

  Then they called downtown, and discovered that the number of men around town—gray herringbone suits and bald—reported to have disappeared into thin air, poof, at exactly 5:00 o’clock, had reached seventy-eight, and was mounting steadily. They stared at me without saying anything.

  They argued about arresting me; one wanted to, the other didn’t. They called downtown again, and then they told me not to leave town without notifying them, and then they left. A little while later, Professor Dunbar rang our doorbell.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said. “I turned my back for a moment, and you were gone. Really, Bob, you must trace that circuit again.”

  Alice smiled and promised that I would come tomorrow and fix the circuit once and for all.

  As the professor was leaving, he said, “Most interesting thing, you know. There must have been two dozen cats outside when I left. All of them exactly like Prudence.”

  “Prudence is the Professor’s cat,” I explained to Alice.

  “Oh, I have Prudence back—oh, yes. I’m very fond of cats. But I never realized how alike they can be.”

  “And I am sure we look alike to cats, Professor Dunbar,” Alice said.

  “Oh, good. Very good indeed. I never thought of it that way. But I suppose we do. Well, tomorrow’s another day.”

  “Thank God it is,” Alice said.

  We let him out and Alice made scrambled eggs for dinner, and then the press began to arrive. They were tiring, but we stuck to our ignorance and smiled disbelievingly about men in gray herringbone suits disappearing into thin air. I don’t know whether it is for better or worse. For a few days, it was a bigger thing than flying saucers, and it made me rather uncomfortable at school. But Alice says it won’t last.

  It’s her theory that I and my gray herringbone suit will be forgotten in a general problem of cats. Professor Dunbar lives in the North Bronx, and when we drove up to his house the following day, to fix a circuit once and for all and to fix it properly, we counted over a hundred cats. Those were the ones we saw. Alice says that cats that don’t disappear—poof—have more lasting interest than college professors who do. Alice says if man can learn to live with the atom, he can learn to live with cats. Anyway, you can’t hold science back, and sooner or later, someone else will tie a knot in time. Only I don’t like to think about it.

  They spoke only one language on Mars—which was one of the reasons why Earth languages fascinated them so. Mrs. Erdig had made the study of English her own hobby. English was rather popular, but lately more and more Martians were turning to Chinese; before that, it had been Russian. But Mrs. Erdig held that no other language had the variety of inflection, subtlety and meaning that English possessed.

  For example, the word righteousness. She mentioned it to her husband tonight.

  “I’m telling you, I just cannot understand it,” she said. “I mean it eludes me just as I feel I can grasp it. And you know how inadequate one feels with an Earth word that is too elusive.”

  “I don’t know how it is,” Mr. Erdig replied absently. His own specialty among Earth languages was Latin—recorded only via the infrequent Vatican broadcasts—and this tells a good deal about what sort of Martian he was. Perhaps a thousand Martians specialized in Latin; certainly no more.

  “Inadequate. It’s obvious,” his wife repeated.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “You know. I wish you wouldn’t make yourself so obtuse. One expects to feel superior to those savages in there on the third planet. It’s provoking to have a word in their language elude you.”

  “What word?” Mr. Erdig asked.

  “You weren’t listening at all. Righteousness.”

  “Well, my own English is nothing to crow about, but I seem to remember what right means.”

  “And righteous means something else entirely, and it makes no sense whatsoever.”

  “Have you tried Lqynn’s dictionary?” Mr. Erdig asked, his thoughts still wrapped around his own problems.

  “Lqynn is a fool!”

  “Of course, my dear. You might get through to Judge Grylyg on the Intertator. He is considered an expert on English verbs.”

  “Oh, you don’t even hear me,” she cried in despair. �
�Even you would know that righteous is not a verb. I feel like I am talking to the wall.”

  Mr. Erdig sat up—its equivalent, for his seven limbs were jointed very differently from a human’s—and apologized to his wife. Actually he loved her and respected her. “Terribly sorry,” he said. “Really, my dear. It’s just that there are so many things these days. I get lost in my thoughts—and depressed too.”

  “I know. I know,” she said with immediate tenderness. “There are so many things. I know how it all weighs on you.”

  “A burden I never asked for.”

  “I know,” she nodded. “How well I know.”

  “Yes, there are Martians and Martians,” Mr. Erdig sighed wearily. “I know some who schemed and bribed and used every trick in the book to get onto the Planetary Council. I didn’t. I never wanted it, never thought of it.”

  “Of course,” his wife agreed.

  “I even thought of refusing—”

  “How could you?” his wife agreed sympathetically. “How could you? No one has ever refused. We would have been pariahs. The children would never hold up their heads again. And it is an honor, darling—an honor second to none. You are a young man, two hundred and eighty years old, young and in your prime. I know what a burden it is. You must try to carry that burden as lightly as possible and not fight everything you don’t agree with.”

  “Not what I don’t agree with,” Mr. Erdig said slowly but distinctly, “not at all. What is wrong.”

  “Can you be sure something is wrong?”

  “This time. Yes, I am sure.”

  “Cato again, I suppose,” Mrs. Erdig nodded.

  “The old fool! Why don’t they see through him! Why don’t they see what a pompous idiot he is!”

  “I suppose some do. But he appears to reflect the prevailing sentiment.”

  “Yes? Well, it seems to me,” said Mr. Erdig, “that he created a good deal of what you call the prevailing sentiment. He rose to speak again yesterday, cleared his throat, and cried out, ‘Earth must be destroyed!’ Just as he has every session these past thirty years. And this time—mind you, my dear—this time he had the gall to repeat it in Latin: ‘Earth esse delendam.’ Soon, he will believe that he is Cato.”